The Tragedy in Ukraine

Most Americans have great concern and compassion for the Ukrainian people, but our government is failing to project American power on behalf of Ukraine.    It appears that Putin has convinced our president that we must play by his rules or risk a wider war.   We need to remember that NATO is much more powerful than the Russian military, so we should deal from a position of strength not fear.  We should  put a marker down for Putin and give  him a date when the airspace over Ukraine will be closed to Russian aircraft and be enforced by NATO.   We must continue our shipments of arms to Ukraine and let Russia know not to interfere with humanitarian help.  Finally we can tell Putin all sanctions will be lifted on Russia if he withdraws completely from  Ukraine.   Nobody wants a world war, but we can't let the threat result in a policy of appeasement.   History has shown the tragic results of that policy.

 Another example of appeasement -

We did not learn from the debacle in Afghanistan as evidenced in the decisions being made in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.   We seem to base our decisions on a fear of escalation with Russia instead of exercising American power and let Russia worry about escalation.  We have it backwards.  Some examples:   We failed to support early before Russia invaded, and now we are concerned about our support being taken as escalation by Russia.  Recently we overlooked Poland's efforts to provide aircraft to Ukraine as well as Ukraine's requesting them; all based on a worry of Russia taking those actions as escalation by the US.   Very disappointing to see us act on the wrong assumptions in this conflict and fail to exercise American power and resolve.